Technology, Culture, and Ethics

Seven Minutes of Terror

I don’t post too much about space technology, but this is worth noting. NASA has released a video, “Seven Minutes of Terror,” dramatizing the landing of the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars. It’s a remarkable sequence of maneuvers that will take Curiosity from 13,000 MPH to 0 MPH in those harrowing seven minutes. Of course, the flight is unmanned and so the terror will be wholly on the side of the engineers, scientists, programmers, etc. who will be watching anxiously as their $2.5 billion mission to Mars makes its final descent on August 6.